Like any author, I’d like you to read my book. Like any reader, you’ve got a decision to make—deciding whether the book’s worth the investment. If not in dollars, certainly in time.
A book is a gamble, isn’t it? Choose wrong and a reader feels cheated, expending time and effort in a failed venture, a doomed relationship… The characters render phoney, the plot’s wooden, and the overall experience just plain unfortunate.
But that’s the downside, and I prefer—for obvious reasons—to envision the opposite.
I’ve read a number of great books by unknown authors (well, at least, at the time, unknown to me), John Nichols’ The Sterile Cuckoo, Vincent Patrick’s Pope of Greenwich Village and James Kirkwood’s P.S. Your Cat is Dead are just three examples.
(And in case you’re thinking, “The nerve of this guy, comparing himself with those authors,” well forgive me, but I’m doing nothing of the sort. I’m simply trying to capture an emotion, describe a feeling—a memory—that stays with me still).
What I mean to say is, I love the euphoria of reading someone I never met deliver something I never expected. And I love when a new (new to me, remember) and unknown author’s work resonates for weeks after that last page is turned. For inexplicable, and, perhaps, unimportant, reasons, it fills me with pride, reading something like that. It’s almost as though I discovered the author all on my own. And I can’t wait to tell everyone I know about my successful discovery—Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado, by the way, is having that very effect on me right now.
What’s odd, however, is, as much as I always remember the excitement of reading an undiscovered gem, what I can never recall—the event too cloudy, the memory too faded away, worse than an old photograph—is what led me to buy it in the first place.
Was it the book’s cover? The title? Its placement on a store’s bookshelf? Or was it simply a hunch—that indescribable, unfathomable, gut feeling that every so often steers us all in the right direction?
I don’t remember, but I wish I did.
Because now, all these years later, it might have been important.
Because now, as I said in my first sentence, I’d like you to read my book. And maybe now, if I could somehow capture what led me to take a chance on any of those unknown writers, I could then fashion an analogy in order to, perhaps, inspire you to buy this unknown author’s unknown novel.
And so, and so, and so.
Here we are, once more, at the beginning.
You’re looking for a book, and I’m looking for a reader.
Hey, what the hay…. Why not take a chance?
